Wilson & Market

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Photography: Brook James

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Photography: Brook James

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Photography: Brook James

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Features

cocktail bar

wine bar

licensed

notable chef

Seafood

British-born chef and restaurateur Paul Wilson is fastidious about ingredients and where they come from. Every few weeks he heads to the small biodynamic Transition Farm, on the Mornington Peninsula, where he sources most of his fruit and veg for his cafe at Prahran Market.

His largely vegetarian breakfast and lunch menu rotates four times a year, which will be represented by cover art by the late Melbourne-based Scottish artist David Band.

Breakfast options include bread and pastries; seaweed pancakes with smoked ocean trout (a mild, buttery slab that can be ordered as a side too), horseradish and pickled cucumber; and a bacon and egg roll with Otway Pork that Wilson cures and smokes himself. Or there’s the coconut Bircher muesli with fruit, plus native muntries that Wilson buys from Matthew Koop, a local forager.

You’ll lick the spicy tomatillo verde off the plate, and demolish the Scotch eggs with house-made relish. The beauty of breakfast here is that it has everything you want it to but (thankfully) it looks and tastes different to the carbon-copy brunch list you now find at almost every cafe in Melbourne.

On the lunch side, Wilson marinates green cauliflower in spices before popping them in a massive wood smoker for around five hours. The dish is served with coconut yoghurt and a kale and quinoa salad.

For the ribollita soup with black Tuscan cabbage, Wilson adds two-day poached Sommerlad chicken that he gets from the Milking Yard Farm, just outside of Daylesford. The rare chook is said to be Australia’s answer to the coveted French Bresse and retails for almost $30 per kilogram.

The large white-tiled Luxe Bar, which stays open long after the last market vendor has packed up. Here, Australian liquors take pride of place, including Four Pillars gin and Archie Rose vodka, which Wilson puts into the Bloody Caesar, a spicy tomato gazpacho-Mary with smashed parmigiano and anchovies.